


Stand For You, Or Fall

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Bloodplay, Drama Llama, Dream Bubbles, F/F, Projection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-18
Updated: 2012-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:32:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the dream bubbles, Vriska is either looking for revenge or redemption. Instead she finds Kanaya, who isn't interested in providing either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stand For You, Or Fall

**Author's Note:**

> You may or may have not noticed my love for throwing in commas in my titles.
> 
> God, I love angrily throwing punctuation in people's faces.

You wake up in a tree with static in your ear.

You know this place. Two sweeps ago, Terezi fed you information on the target’s movements; in the bubble, you hear, “Yup, no one’s around, lonely post-mortem isolation cell!” instead. Figures. You've fallen out of John’s bubble, and now it’s going to be ages before you hunt him down again.

You hop out of the tree. The soil is wet and loamy. The tree leaves are pale pink and fast, hot blues. It’s winter, or what passes for winter out here. Gray rain falling in slanting walls, featherthings hissing and huddled together in flocks. Fruit glistens on the branches, unripe. Castles rise behind you.

Kanaya is in the garden, chainsaw in hand.

“Hey,” you say.

She revs up her weapon and lops off a branch. It lands in the mulch. Her dress is a new one—you’ve never seen it before. And the gray in her eyes is fading to green. She has some nerve, showing up in your bubble and pretending you’re invisible! She has even more nerve to think to ignore you when she’s the one who’s been avoiding you.

“Hey!” you say, angrier. You pick up a dirt clod. When she continues to work on the bushes, you lob it at her head. It bounces off a branch. A black-winged featherthing squawks at you, then forgets you exist. She turns her head to you, and says, “Hmm.”

“Yeah, hmm,” you say. “Hmm what, Kanaya? Hmm, I wonder what Vriska’s been up to! Aren’t you surprised to see me?”

“Only disappointed that the drones are so hopeless at horticulture,” she says. She hacks off two more branches. “These are dream bubbles. It is only natural that I’d encounter you when I have occasion to sleep.”

There’s a long quiet moment when two purple fruits roll over to your feet. You pick up one and toss it up and down in your hand. You feel like chucking this in her face, too, for revenge. But you don’t want her to leave.

“You’ve never come out here to visit me before,” you say.

“I was busy.”

“Busy with what, shipping Bilbo and Sam in the flushed quadrant?”

She’s cross immediately, just as you knew she’d be. “Frodo only thinks of Samwise as an accessory and everyone knows Samwise only liked Bilbo’s part of _There And_ —”

“You’re still stuck on that trash?” you sneer. “Whatever! Not like I need you. I’m so vicious there’s a whole _line_ of people who want a piece of my reformed homicidal ass.” John, for one. God, he’s great. Too bad he’s dead. She lowers her chainsaw. She looks at you, with so much pity that you wish you could boot her out of the bubble. Then you consider floating around through the Rings alone again, and take the wish back. “Do you even know what I’ve been up to, Fussyfangs?”

“Smelting all your fiery irons, I imagine.”

“Fuck you!” you say with as much cheer as you can drag out of your fuzzed up head. Her fangs press down into her lips, and she looks, almost, sorry. She should feel sorry. You’re _dead_ , and what did she do to stop it? Some friend she was.

She puts her chainsaw on the ground. You sit beneath the tree, and she joins you. She puts the chainsaw between you two. Then she turns it to lipstick. She turns the tube over and over again in her hands, brow furrowed, skin pinched around her eyes. Finally, she says, “You must be cold.” Your clothes are still dry, shielded by memory, and her clothes are vibrant with the light of her undeath. Even so, she strokes your hair, as though to chase away the chill.

 

*

 

You don’t go looking for John. There’s business to take care of, after all. It’s not going to get solved by having John, cute but not the right John, taking you to Tacoma, because Tacoma’s a craphole. You've completely forgot about Kanaya during the last few weeks! Hell, you thought she never had to sleep because of the whole rainbow drinker thing. Now you wonder if it’s Terezi who’s the sleepless wonder. Terezi who never appears in these bubbles, that lousy backstabbing dragon bitch.

The dream bubble wobbles, uncomfortably. You’re bored. You saw at your neck with a plastic knife—dumbass humans, who wants a knife you can’t stab people with?—and pretend you can summon Kanaya if you gush enough blood. It doesn’t cut through skin. You sit in your rainy garden and jam the earpiece deeper into your head. The sound is of eight electronic oceans, saying nothing.

You never tire in these bubbles, but your consciousness floats, untethered, from one moment to the next. When you come to again, she’s cutting the trees into the shape of a howlbeast. You toss the knife at her. It nosedives before it even reaches the halfway point. She turns off her chainsaw, and takes a moment to admire the sharp, pointy muzzle of her treebeast. Then she says, “What memory is this? This isn’t your hive.”

“I don’t know,” you say. You do know. You were four sweeps old. You and Terezi laid an ambush for the clouder. It was perfect. You raided the hive and came away drunk with power and money and reputation. She laughed in your ear, like she loved winning more than she loved anything or anyone else.

She reaches for you. You don’t withdraw, but your brain does catch fire from the sheer unfairness of her light-shattered skin. “You’re being obtuse,” she says. “Although that’s not so different from how you usually are—”

“Everything I did was carefully planned! _Acutely_ planned.” You rub the front of your shirt. It comes away wet.

Kanaya scans the trees, then the hive, and says, “If you are waiting for Terezi, she sleeps on a thirty-six hour cycle.”

“Yeah, I’m waiting for her,” you say. “I’m waiting for her to run me through again, like a good wiggler who likes her schoolfeeding! Get real, Fussyfangs. Why would I want to see her?”

“I only assumed.”

“Well, you assumed wrong! Pass me an apple.”

“Apples don’t grow on these kinds of trees,” she says. “They don’t even come in these colors. You remember things with a remarkably low fidelity to facts. Also, common sense.”

“So’s your face,” you say. She tosses you an orange apple, and takes a red one for herself.

 

*

 

She takes you underground to see her lusus. She tilts her head forward to avoid scraping her horns against the ceiling. You can, if you jump a little, scratch three parallel lines in the dirt. You stuff your hands in your pockets and stare at her back.

Her lusus is just as cool as you thought it’d be. Big and white and just a bit of jade. Her face is a giant skull, how fucking awesome is that? And they have the same horns! Kanaya lets you help her groom the big moth. Her lusus’ skin is smooth beneath your fingers, and soft. You bet she could be killed by a strong breeze. Kanaya coos over her big, fragile mother; she smiles like she could do this forever. Her lusus doesn’t shy away from you, even when you push the tips of your nails into her translucent wings. It’s probably because, you think angrily, she’s dead. So what if she thinks she’s beyond pain? You can hurt her if you want to. People should run from you, screaming in terror—they should come back to you, and stay.

Afterwards, Kanaya takes you back to your hive. She scrubs the dirt out of your hands, washes beneath your nails. She pins your hair up at the back of your head and feels your shoulder blades, where you can make your wings appear and disappear at will.

You haven’t seen Terezi, not once. She’s avoiding you, too gutless to show herself. You’re never going to see her again. You’re never going to see her again because she doesn’t want to remember how she stuck a sword through your back and watched you bleed out, just when you were this close to winning everything for her—for John—for everyone.

Kanaya tells you about life on the asteroid: how everyone’s going stir-crazy, how she has been reading books, how Terezi and Dave have arranged a sleepover and abused everyone with verbal slams until Karkat screamed so loud and long that he fainted. She never lingers much on Gamzee, and skirts around Lalonde. You push her for details until her glow flares hot and she shuts you down before you can even open your mouth. She forces herself to soften. Then you say, with eight o’s, _Rose_ and her claws dig into your arteries and veins. You spin around and shove her into the tiles of her bathroom floor. There's blood on the collar of your shirt, on the bottom hem. You grab her face and stick your tongue in her mouth. Genius that you are, you get two long cuts on the soft side, and a squawk and a flail of the limbs that catches you right in the solar plexus.

“What the hell, Vriska,” she says, and she looks just like you want her to, a little lost and angry and almost like she wants to drink out of your mouth.

“Ha, ha,” you say. “Wimp.”

Blood drips off her fangs. She swipes her tongue over blue-blushed teeth, and the color changes: purple to human red, then teal. You put the tip of her claws against your neck and force them in so deep that blood comes out. It doesn’t hurt—nothing hurts for you anymore. She yanks her hand away, and casts alarmed, white light all over the block. You laugh. Yeah, come on, what is she going to do, what are you going to do, Fussyfangs, let me die again? Chicken! You don’t even have chickens on Alternia. You draw out the 'i' anyway.

You’re still laughing when she bites you. You don’t let her get off easy, either. You urge her on, flop your spindly wrists against her neck. When she’s about to draw away, you press her closer—can’t you do it, Fussyfangs, can’t you be a killer? Oh, wait, I forgot, _you already are,_ my bad! Ha, ha.

There’s a tussle, or something like it. She’s bigger than you now, bigger and stronger and you’re nothing but a soul without a body, a nebulous bundle of thoughts and feelings shoved into an image and set loose in the middle of fucking nowhere. You thrash and tell her to bite, bite me, fuck you! What, too much of a wimp to kill me? Fuck you, fuck you, _fuck you_!

Fuck you, you whimper into her shoulder. She holds you, and rocks you gently. Her teeth are still in your neck. She takes a straw’s sip every now and then, and the colors that shred through your vision make your eyes water.

When she lets go, you’re still dead, and she’s still hungry. Two constants of the universe, like gravity and entropy, only way, way stupider.

She kisses you, like she’s imagining your windpipe as a wet smear of meat on the ground. She kisses like she wanted to die for you, once, like you're the one who betrayed her and not the other way around. You almost believe the way she sees things. Almost.

" _Yes_ ," you say, but you know: she could bite you eight hundred times and it won’t bring you back. She could tear you apart and you’d still as be dead as ever. You could kill _her_ , maybe, for no good reason except to prove that you could, and she’ll still be on the other side of the dead-alive continuum, which isn’t a continuum unless your name is Sollux Captor, that prickly douchebag, or Kanaya “Glow In The Dark” Maryam. She should to be down here with you—no, you've done that already. Hooked yourself into her mind with a few words and now she kisses like you’re the first thing she’s ever hated. You've cheated your way into a blind alley, way to go, Serket, you're the best at nothing—

She pulls away, and bites you until you’re blind.

 

*

 

John’s told you before that you’re actually no good at hate, and he’s probably right, because afterwards you feel maybe a little guilty. She won’t talk to you, she won’t look to you; she storms out of the dream bubble and you chase her, because you miss her too much to have her mad at you.

This is what being dead does to you. It makes you worried that she’s going to spend the rest of her long, immortal life hating you. At one time, you thought you could do anything and it’d just make her pity you more; now you know her pity, like anyone else's, is conditional, and she hates in a cold, frozen way that leaves her relationships floating like broken battleships in space.

You tackle her to the ground in one of your FLARPing memories, magenta rocks on the beach and green water on yellow sand. Kanaya shoves you off of her and hauls herself to a dryer part of the beach. She snarls. She looks like she wants to give you every disease in the universe. She looks like she wants you to go away. During the game, you would’ve delighted in getting her to be mad, really mad, at you, instead of sulking in Frogworld and pretending you didn’t exist. Now you realize you’ve never wanted her to hate you. You wanted someone to look after you, someone who would never get mad at you for killing no matter how hard you pushed them.

You were very naive, once, to think you could get away with everything.

You creep closer. “Come on,” you say. “No harm, no foul, right?”

It’s the wrong thing to say, but she doesn’t run. She doesn’t get madder, either. She doesn’t look or speak to you, but she lets you sit next to her. There’s blue blood in the water and static in your ears. You imagine Terezi coming over the waves, asking if you’re all right. Maybe, if she was still in the thrall of the dream, you would’ve said, “Yeah, fine!” and commented how the blue blood in the water makes her color appear. And then you hauled the body up to your shoulders and took it home.

You hear static. You hear waves.

“You are,” Kanaya says, “a disaster.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I was good at it.”

“Too good at it,” she says, sadly.

Yeah.

You wanted to be great, and of course you are. You wanted to be a hero—maybe you could've been one. Maybe you were the shittiest, worst hero to ever exist. You were executed, and no one stopped it—what could you have done, you wonder, to not have deserved it.

Right now, you just want someone to pat you on the head and tell you how good you are, haven’t you coped with being dead so well, isn’t Terezi sorry for what she did to you. And you want to know what to say to Kanaya. There has to be something. Your thinkpan is empty and full of shit.

“Pat my head, Fussyfangs,” you say roughly. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She strokes your hair, once, twice, then wrings it dry. You are both wet with salty, ocean water. Your head fits, neatly, against her shoulder, and her hand is just the right size to go between your horns. You can’t tell if you’re hearing a third person breathing in your ear, or if it’s just the wind. She says, gently, “I must go.”

“Lame-o,” you say. “What, tired of me already? I understand. You can’t handle my gravy train.”

She gives you the most exasperated look ever, and then kisses the top of your head.

“Wait,” you say, just before she can fade into awakeness.

She waits for you. You swallow.

“Forgeeeeeeeet it,” you say. “I'll tell you when you come back.”

“Are we talking about Terezi?” she says. When you don’t say anything, she says, “It's not her fault.”

“Whose side are you even on?” you snap.

“My own,” she says. Her voice suggests glaciers, or maybe teeth. She straightens out her skirt, adjusts the part in her hair. The stupid thing is, no one’s even going to see it once she wakes up. “I’ll tell her that you miss her. I’ll tell her to come armed.”

You don’t want her to come with a sword.

She leaves you to face the sun alone. You don’t remember this part happening, because you were already home when the sun came up—and there you are again, at the entrance of your hive. The dead boy stains the floor. You remember that you never once tried to get the blue out of the stone, and when you try now, you sink the color in deeper, so deep it won’t ever come out. You’re bleeding from your chest, even though you should have blood running blue down the length of your arm.

 _Well,_ Terezi once said as you dragged his body to the caverns, _this is his just desserts!_

Just, heroic, you’re sick of those words! Fussyfangs retreating to her own side of everything. Terezi, always on her side of this line or that line. 

The sound in your ears is that of distant oceans to which you will never return.


End file.
